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'Far Cry 3' Review - Part One: Better Run Through The Jungle

Far Cry 3 is an excellent game, but it makes some unfortunate trade-offs between story and open-world gameplay.

I’m creeping through a gorgeous jungle, full of color, beneath a deep blue sky with my upgraded SMG equipped with a Red-Dot Sight and a Silencer.

Below me is a pirate outpost, manned by a handful of guards. There’s one or two snipers from what I can tell, and a Heavy lumbering about. I’ve spotted a couple crazy guys packing Molotov Cocktails who won’t drop dead even if when I shoot them, they erupt into flame.

I have choices now.

If I go in guns blazing I might be able to take everyone out, but they’ll almost certainly raise the alarm and then I’ll have to face reinforcements—and even if I take them out and capture this outpost, I won’t get the experience points that a stealthier approach would give me.

If I can dismantle the alarm instead, even if I’m spotted the pirates won’t be able to call for help. This will net a bigger reward, and after the initial sabotage, the fight will be much easier.

But the best thing I can do is to dismantle the alarm as a precautionary measure and then silently, methodically, take out each guard without any of them noticing me. That’s the goal, and I won’t be happy with this assault unless I carry it out flawlessly. I can lay down some mines to help me make a quick get away after dismantling the guards.

I begin planning my approach.

Then suddenly I hear a growl behind me, and a tiger leaps out of the bush behind me, pinning me to the ground.

I wasn’t ready for this. I’ve been marking targets with my camera, planning my next move, and now I’m shooting frantically at this hulking beast. I manage to kill him, but my gunfire has alerted the pirates. So much for stealth.

Brave New Open World

Far Cry 3 is an interesting game. You play as Jason Brody, a stranded vacationer with no experience shooting people who is suddenly faced with the impossible task of rescuing his friends from the pirates.

If you don’t, they’ll either be killed or sold into slavery. You have to learn quick, and because this is a video game, you happen to be a very quick study at the art of slaughter.

The game is wide open, spread out across a vast map of various-sized tropical islands populated by the “peaceful” Rakyat natives (who are anything but peaceful) and crazed, bloodthirsty pirates, as well as a menagerie of wildlife ranging from small deer to wild boar and the aforementioned tigers. Not to mention the deadly, annoying Komodo dragons. I hate those things.

The island is beautiful and dangerous and a hell of a lot of fun to explore, which turns out to be a pretty big part of the game.

The map starts out mostly blurred out, with only a handful of location icons in the areas you haven’t explored, such as radio towers.

Climbing a radio tower unlocks another segment of the map, giving you a great deal more information about roads, animals, plant-life, and new side missions.

Likewise, the map is colored in to show which portions are under pirate control and which portions are under tribal control. You can change the color of the map by capturing outposts. This also unlocks new fast travel locations, convenient weapon shops, and new missions.

There’s all sorts of stuff to do—an overwhelming amount, actually.

Missions are varied, ranging from racing quests to hit jobs to animal hunts.

Like Assassin’s Creed with Guns and Actually Fun Combat

If you ever wondered what Assassin’s Creed III would be like if it were a first-person shooter set in a jungle island full of maniacs, well Far Cry 3 is here to help. In fact, it’s sort of a mixture of Red Dead Redemption, Assassin’s Creed, and Uncharted, all mixed up and filtered into a first-person-shooter.

AC3 and Far Cry 3 are very, very similar in terms of their open-world and side-mission mechanics. You can search for hidden relics, discover the islands lore via lost letters, and unlock the backstory by finding memory chips. All the while you gain experience and level up, unlocking weapons and skills and various other perks, and climbing towers to expand access to the map.

It’s basically a light RPG mixed with a big wide-open shooter, and in many ways I think it actually feels more RPG-ish than Borderlands 2 with its never-ending supply of bigger and more preposterous firearms.

Unlike Assassin’s Creed III, however, the game doesn’t get off to a really slow start. Rather, it begins with a surprising intensity driven largely by the wonderfully maniacal pirate chief Vaas.

Here’s where things get tricky for me. On the one hand, Far Cry 3 starts out with a really compelling crisis and momentum.

There’s a story here, a rising intensity, an immediacy that drives your every move. You have to save your friends and your girlfriend and your little brother from certain death or enslavement, and you’re up against apparently insurmountable odds.

The clock is ticking….

Naturally, the thing to do is explore the island, run drop-off missions, and search for relics. Or, wait, that doesn’t make sense—does it?

Difficult Compromises

The thing about Far Cry 3 is that it makes a trade-off between story and its open world design. It achieves both these things quite well, but when you couple the two you lose that sense of urgency. “I’ll play ball,” Jason says at one point, “As long as it helps me find my brother.” And it will help you save your people, but it sure feels like you (as Jason) don’t mind taking your sweet time.

So far, I’ve spent a great deal of the game hunting animals and using their skins to craft larger ammo pouches and other valuable items. The crafting system is simple but effective, and crafting gives you distinct and even necessary advantages as you progress. I’ve also spent time crafting syringes to heal myself or give me boosts in battle. This is another system that works quite well.

And, of course, I’ve sought out as many radio towers as possible, climbing them like I’d climb a parapet in Assassin’s Creed, to gain knowledge of the island by broadening my horizons.

The most fun I’ve had is my sneak attacks against the pirate outposts. A successful sneak attack is at once challenging and rewarding and gives you blessed fast travel locations, so I’ve gotten side-tracked from the main story many times over.

This is a weird, perhaps impossible balancing act, and the game doesn’t really pull it off. Maybe it can’t, maybe that’s too tall an order, and maybe the trade-off made is the right one.

Still, it’s almost like playing two different games. They’re both fun, but they feel disjointed. The story feels like something that should be urgent. It feels wrong to be doing all this side stuff while my friends languish in captivity.

But it’s the way you level up and become powerful enough to progress through the story, and it’s fun, so off you go to play ball. It makes sense to have the game function this way, and the open-world nature of the game really makes it a much more interesting, addictive shooter than most.

But the urgency of the story itself suffers as a consequence.

Only the Lonely

My second quibble with the game so far is simply how populated the island is, how civilized it feels despite its piracy and poverty.

When I first caught glimpses of the game, it looked like you’d escape the pirates and then have to survive the jungle on your own. This is not the case.

Rather, you have an entire village of warriors to help out, a steady supply of weapons and ammo, and access to all sorts of vehicles.

I thought the game would be more frightening, that I would be alone in the way you faced the island alone in the first Far Cry (at least for most of the game.) But other than a few gripping scenes in the main story, there’s little fright at all.

As a member of one side of a civil war, your role is more heroic and less survivalist.

The stakes feel lower than they could be, and the need to carefully make your way across the island is all but absent for most of the game.

Stuck on a pirate-infested island all by yourself or with the aid of maybe just a handful of people would have made the game much more intense. As it stands, too often it feels lackadaisical rather than engrossing.

Conclusion (So Far)

Of course,quibbles are only one part of the story.

As I mentioned, the missions and side jobs you take on in the open-world portion of the game are often lots of fun.

Unlocking more weapon slots and ammo storage is a process which requires exploration and experience. Most everything you set out to do is entertaining, and there’s so much of it that you pretty much never run out of content.

The story is well written and acted by talented voice actors, and the game looks and feels great, even on the aging Xbox 360.

Far Cry 3, in other words, is a great game in spite of its trade-offs and regardless of the ways it might have been better.

It’s not a perfect game—and I certainly wouldn’t give it a 10/10 if I were scoring it—but it’s much more interesting and fun than Assassin’s Creed III, and the sheer quantity of content sprinkled across the islands, and the many ways you can tackle each fight and mission, make it one of the better shooters in a long time. Certainly the game is a contender for 2012′s best shooter.

I think perhaps the most critical thing about any game is whether or not I feel like finishing it. This is especially true as someone who reviews games. Does playing it feel like a chore? Do I keep thinking, “I wish I was playing Dark Souls instead?”

I want to finish Far Cry 3, and that must say something about the game. More to come in Part Two.

Far Cry 3 launches tomorrow, December 4th, on PS3, Xbox 360, and PC.

(P.S. I haven’t played the multiplayer yet, so expect more installments as I continue to play. I’ll check out the PC version as well and report back on how it stacks up against its Xbox 360 counterpart.)

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The issue of dividing time between the main story and optional missions and resultant loss of agency in the story, is an example of the flaws of ‘game logic’, and is shared by many games (especially RPGs). There’s a very interesting article by Gather Your Party discussing the distortion of time in videogames.

I think that can be attributed to just about any game that isn’t strictly linear. It’s easy to produce a sense of urgency in a game such as Call of Duty because the player has little choice over what to do next. You’re given a mission, a relatively linear path, and some objectives. You accomplish them and you’re immediately shuffled to the next linear mission with new objectives.

It’s much harder to do so in other game genres, particularly open world or sandbox games. How can you keep a sense of urgency to a main plot when there are dozens of side plots to tackle, all of which may net you cool rewards? The Elder Scrolls games constantly run into this problem, as the main plot is almost always secondary to all the other crap there is to do in between. Do I save the world? Well, I mean, I want to and all, but first let me follow this talking dog!

But do you get to fist fight the Pope after a duel with him using a +5 Pope Staff of Gandalf’s might wherein he stabs you and it does….nothing? I thought not!

The only game that ever tried to deal with time and side missions that I can recall was Majora’s Mask. The time limit will certainly turn players off, but it really made the narrative in the side quests much better (and the game as a whole).

@Jack:

I wish the Elder Scrolls would just drop the main story. Skyrim’s writing was at its best in the intro (they did a really good job getting players up to speed on the state of Skyrim) and the lore/journals/notes inside dungeons. My favorite part of that game was exploring a ruin and learning about the (often) unlucky fate of those whom came before. It added context to the place I was exploring and made the world really come alive. Imagine an Elder Scrolls game that stopped trying to present its own fantasy epic and fully embraced “players making their own fantasy epic”.

Sounds an awful lot like STALKER, except with a worse atmosphere and AAA polish. STALKER’s atmosphere is one of the best I’ve ever seen, being even more oppressive and lonely than Dark Souls, but even as a great fan of the game I can’t deny that it is a bug ridden mess. If Far Cry 3 can approximate that experience with fewer bugs and glitches and general crappiness, then I’d love to give it a shot, even if like you said it feels a bit crowded.

STALKER *was* a big ridden mess…plenty of mods, patches, and complete overhauls that have been out for years that fix just about everything that plagued the game. Plus you can get a sleeping bag! Same for Call of Pripyat. STALKER is easily in my top 3 games. That game oozes atmosphere. Remember first stepping into the underground lab? Wow.

Put a few hours into the game. The plot/gameplay tension is annoying. I feel like that’s a step backwards for sandbox games like this.

I’m probably less a fan of emergent gameplay than most people. Not that I don’t like it, just that I’d rather play a point and click adventure game with a great story than be given free reign to pointlessly blow things up at the expense of the story. However, the gameplay is fun enough that I can forgive Far Cry’s discretions (even with the digression from the great use of emergent gameplay to reinforce the narrative in the previous game).

I’ll just relay a little story: I was off hunting some tapir in the game. I got low on ammo but I finally got my quarry. As I’m going to skin the tapir, I stumble across some pirates patrolling. They shoot at me and I run off into the jungle. Things go quiet, then all of a sudden I hear tons of gunfire but none of it’s coming towards me. So I go back to check it out and see a tiger mauling the patrol. It takes out two guys then runs over to the other two guys. While they’re distracted I grab an AK from the two dead guys and open up on the group. I kill the tiger and the two soldiers, but it turns out there was another guy that I didn’t see, further off. I run back into the jungle, and that turns into a simple game of cat and mouse. Long story short, he ends up with a machete though his back

It’s times like that where I realize that no on-rails experience can compare to a story told through emergent gameplay. But ultimately, the story still has to add up to something. In this case all it added up to was me getting some tapir and tiger skins… so I could craft a bigger bag to hold more skins.

But that’s still by far one of the coolest loot hunts I’ve ever been on in any game, so I’ll probably be playing this one for a while.